For a first or continuous fitting of hearing devices, such as individually customized behind the ear or in-the-ear hearing aids of a user of the hearing device, the process comprises the steps of retrieving and storing data about diagnostic information about the user's hearing loss, information about the user's preferences and previous experience with hearing amplification, choosing one of several known formulas for deriving an initial gain setting based on the information above, the acoustic coupling of the user's ear and individual demands and eventually complaints from the user with regard to particular listing situations. These data will serve as input parameters for the fitting process. During the fitting process, the parameters will then have to be adjusted by using the mentioned parameters to reach the desired result.
This fitting process is regularly made by a hearing professional who has access to said parameters. If the user has to change the hearing professional, the new hearing professional has to recreate the current fitting adjustments or fitting parameters of the hearing device.
In known hearing devices those fitting parameters are stored in non-volatile memory inside the hearing aid itself that may be read out by the hearing professionals by a fitting interface. The data may then be used within a fitting software usually provided by the manufacturer of the hearing device. The amount of memory needed to store such information is typically very high and is thus undesirable with respect to the limited amount of memory typically available in hearing devices. An extension of the memory of hearing devices is expensive and occupies the restricted volume of the usually miniaturized hearing device. It is thus desirable to limit the amount of memory required by the hearing device for all its functionality.
One known solution for saving memory amount within the hearing device is to store information or data on an external storage medium. If this external storage medium has to be handled by the user of the hearing device, the risk of failure due to a loss of this storage device or a faulty manipulation of the external storage is very high.
WO 2005/125281 and WO 2005/003902 are describing systems for storing and retrieving data in a remote database system. Thus, the amount of memory needed by those data may be saved in the internal memory of the hearing device. On the other hand, the data on the centralized database system are not secured and may eventually be used by any person interested in such data. For a user of a hearing device, it is regularly undesirable to have stored its private data on a centralized database system with uncontrolled access to those data.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a method for providing a secure and complete set of data of individual fitting parameters for performing the fitting process for a hearing device.